RFC: Drop --disable-plugins to always enable plugins

[H.J. Lu]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 11:10 PM Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 10:01:59PM -0700, H.J. Lu wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 5, 2025, 9:34 PM Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 09:06:29PM -0700, H.J. Lu wrote:
> > > > BTW, should we drop --disable-plugins to always enable plugins?
> > > > Binutils should still work with compilers which don't support plugin.
> > >
> > > bfd/configure.ac disables plugins for various targets, so I think we're
> > > stuck with BFD_SUPPORTS_PLUGINS == 0.  Otherwise something would need
> > > to be done for hpux, vms and aix to fix their ar support.
> > >
> >
> > Did you mean host? If a host doesn't support dlopen,
> > it can be treated as if dlopen fails.
>
> No, target.  When BFD_SUPPORTS_PLUGINS ar and other binutils use
> a default target of "plugin".  plugin_vec uses the generic archive
> support, while their target vec uses another archive format.
>

Do we enable plugin with --enable-targets=all on hpux?

Do we disable plugin on Linux when hpux is also enabled?

I enabled plugin to build cross-compiling to hpux on Linux.  There is
no test failure.

Can we require the generic archive support if input has plugin?

-- 
H.J.